Why Are We Still Talking About Avocado Toast?

This is a story of a dish everyone loved, then everyone hated but hardly anyone stopped eating. It’s a story about love and fashion, of private devotion and public shame. It’s a story of a thing with an unclear past and an evolving present, though it never really changes. It’s about millennial excess to some—a hashtag on more than 400,000 Instagrams.

To others it shows the cynicism of restaurants eager to make bank on a dish with the easiest of odds: a vegetal-tasting fruit of supermarket ubiquity, spread onto the world’s most common comfort food.

Yes, this is a story about avocado toast. Simple as that. Or, rather, “basic”—trendy in a bland, unquestioning way, without imagination or style—that’s what avocado toast has become. But that doesn't mean we’ve stopped paying $9 for it.

I’m in Brooklyn—Williamsburg—at a café called Sweatshop, a few steps down from the sidewalk, taking a phone pic of the “Avo Smash.” It’s gorgeous: a coarse smear of the buttery fruit with wide strips of mint. Sweatshop, which has a retail wall styled with athleisurely appropriate merch and $24 European journals, knows how to frame its avocado toast for maximum photo pop, on a deep-gray plate that makes the greenness glow. There’s feta on the toast, a salty background for the oily delicacy of avocado and the brightness of mint. I feel self-conscious for getting it, and yet I choose my best shot, tweak the color, and post it to Instagram. I joke in the caption about being basic—a way of distancing myself, signaling that I know avocado toast is a silly cliché, even as I can’t help myself.

This is not how the frenzy started, with such lingering embarrassment. Not so long ago it was possible to be unabashed in your love for avocado toast. That was when Australians were taking care of the mashing, the spreading, and the launching of what’s become a particularly American obsession.

The Avo Smash at Sweatshop, in the classic Aussie style with feta, citrus, and mint, is by far the most popular menu item; the café sells as many as 400 each week.

Photo by Alex Lau

Melbourne is where Besha Rodell—the LA Weekly food critic and an Aussie herself—first got to know avocado toast, in the electrified scene of family-run cafés. Australia, like England, has a penchant for serving things on toast. Instead of Britain’s Marmite and baked bean lovelies, Vegemite and mashed avocado became favored spreads Down Under. Australians began cultivating avocados in the late 1920s with varieties imported from California. (Remember that; it’ll come up later.)

“Avocado toast is a 100 percent Australian invention,” Rodell wrote last year on Eater, “insofar as any one ingredient on a piece of bread can be.” There’s little doubt that modern avo toast—the Instagram kind—can trace its existence to that continent. In fact, Sweatshop’s owners are two dudes from Melbourne. The menu, with its Jaffle (a pressed cheese sandwich with optional Vegemite), is as Aussie as chef Curtis Stone’s rooster cut.

In 1993 Sydney chef and restaurateur Bill Granger put a sexed-up version of avocado toast—with lime, salt, and chile flakes (the modern foundational recipe)—on the menu at Bills in Darlinghurst, near Sydney. In the new millennium, it jumped to New York City via Chloe Osborne, another Aussie, who became the consulting chef of Cafe Gitane in Greenwich Village. Her version was similarly Australian: a pebble-grained slice from a square loaf, toasted and covered in mashed avocado, diamond-cut and confetti-covered with crushed chile. The fashion models and post–Carrie Bradshaw brunchers made Gitane’s avo toast a thing: healthyish, exotic, simple, yet piously extravagant. It migrated into magazines and other restaurants, and with the launch of Instagram in 2010, to the screen of every food follower in America. By 2013 we were approaching peak toast.

That was the year Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle cookbook, It’s All Good, was published. In that, avocado toast was one accessory of a radiant life devoted to psychospiritual nutrition, part of a conscious uncoupling from sausage and lattes. Gluten-free toast spread with vegan mayo—Vegenaise—under a simple arrangement of avocado slices and salt: Paltrow called it a “holy trinity” not unlike “a favorite pair of jeans.” Avocado toast had become the thing you wanted to jimmy yourself into every morning, something that could make your ass look triple-heart-eye-emoji-face amazing.

After getting Goop’ed, there was nowhere to go but down. And avocado toast—having flown too close to the sun of post-yoga breakfast terraces of lifestyle gurus’ Santa Barbara ranches—began to plummet toward the sea of cynicism. In America, Rodell says, it came to signify status, which is how avocado toast became “basic.” It’s why I feel chagrin, tweaked through a filter of guilt, for posting my Sweatshop pic. It’s like, Look at me! I’m living my bomb life and have the photographic evidence to prove it! It’s everything I hate about Instagram, and aspirationalism, and using food as a lifestyle marker. It’s also, I admit, everything I love about those things.

“Restaurants figured out they could make it and we would Instagram the s**t out of it,” says Marian Bull, a GQfood writer. And by “we,” Bull says, she means “millennials who live in cities.” Ordering avocado toast once branded you as in the know, cultured even. Then, amid internet stories with titles like “Why Avocado Toast Isn’t Cool Anymore,” it marked you as a striver, scrambling to keep up. “It’s overplayed,” adds chef Gerardo Gonzalez of Lalito in NYC, who grew up with avocado trees in his grandmother’s San Diego backyard. “It’s lazy to open a business in 2017 where your thing is avocado toast.”

Food trends come and go. In this era of kale salad and artisanal yogurt in cute glass jars, that’s almost too obvious to say. But there’s something different, something more rapid and more internet-y, about the rise and fall of avocado toast. Louis Diat created vichyssoise at Manhattan’s Ritz-Carlton in 1917, and it was almost immediately the most stylish dish in New York City. Vichyssoise enjoyed a 40-year ride up the trend-line curve before it peaked—to the fashionable, it began to seem outdated and tepid. The puréed potato-leek cold soup spent another 20 years ratcheting down the status ladder. Nowadays, with Instagram and Pinterest and an online food media ravenous for fresh finds and blistering hot takes, that trajectory is considerably shorter, even as enthusiasm screams louder than ever. So can a perfect three-ingredient thing have a life beyond the trend cycle? Can avocado toast outlast its own hype?

To find out, I headed to the place with a history of the dish that predates the Aussies. The place where avocado toast was actually born.

Goldie’s serves the same version (crowned with smoked chile flakes, lemon, and chives) that its NYC-based sister restaurant Ruby‘s started back in 2003.

Photo by Alex Lau

It's hot in Los Angeles. Richard Parks III has a college-style oxford button-down and a double-flocked mustache. He stands out from the bros here on the terrace of Goldie’s in Beverly Grove, guys in man-tanks and short shorts and backward caps.

Parks is a 35-year-old food writer and filmmaker. He talks about growing up in L.A., where a 100-year-old avocado tree behind his family’s 100-year-old Craftsman blocked the view to the Hollywood sign. He’s telling me what a pain it was to have to pick up the avocados that fell before the squirrels got to them.

“Bags and bags of avocados,” Parks says. They were smooth-skinned—not like the blackish bumpy Hass avocados we often see in supermarket bins. The pits were large; they left little room for flesh, so getting enough required scraping the shells. Parks’ dad, the well-known composer Van Dyke Parks, made avocado toast on English muffins as a snack for Richard and his siblings.

Parks the elder toasted the muffins, applied an impasto of avo, and sprinkled on Cavender’s All Purpose Greek Seasoning. “He had a secret,” Richard says. “It was double toasting: Toast the muffin, mash on the avocado, and put it under the broiler again. He was proud of that.” Other parents had their own tricks. That’s because, by the 1980s, the city already had a half-century culture of avo toast. A 1931 column in the Los Angeles Times announced that in the coffee shop of the swank Clark Hotel downtown, ladies “tired out from shopping” could refresh themselves with one of the “delightful luncheons,” only 50 cents. These included avocado on toast and “delicious coffee, iced or hot.”

But even in 1931, avocado toast wasn’t new. In 1920, in the Covina Argus, a newspaper from a town in the San Gabriel Valley, a writer named Martin Fesler gave his recipe for Avocado on Toast: “Remove the skin and mash with a fork. Spread thickly on a small square of hot toast. Add a little salt and pepper.” He called it one of the nicest ways of serving avocado.

By the time Genevieve A. Callahan wrote the Sunset All-Western Cook Book in 1933, avocado toast was worth describing in her section on avocados (she strains and seasons the pulp), though it didn’t warrant a formal recipe. The dish was just something you needed to know as a Southern Californian to deal with the excess fruit from your yard or with the bags the neighbor lugged over from hers. It was nearby, in San Marino, where modern avocado production began in the late 19th century, mostly by amateur horticulturalists like Rudolph Hass. In 1935 he patented the Hass avocado, by far the world’s premier commercial variety.

I learn all this as Parks and I eat Goldie’s avocado toast. We’re here at the suggestion of another L.A. native, Kris Yenbamroong, chef of the Night + Market restaurants. Parks asked Yenbamroong where he should take me to taste a great version: Goldie’s is a slice of levain toasted on the wood-and-coal grill, spread with a dome of smoothed avocado chunks, crowned with smoked chile flakes, lemon, chives, and salt. The heat and saltiness spike to Isan levels—it’s not hard to guess why Yenbamroong, who cooks Thai food, likes it so much. But it’s funny and ironic, as only avocado toast can be: One of the best versions in Los Angeles—in a town where kids grew up taking the dish for granted or not thinking about it at all—is the work of a chef from Sydney named Thomas Lim. His is a homegrown edition that, like a college kid who studied abroad for one semester, has the cockiness of having traveled halfway around the world.

Later it occurs to me that I forgot to ask Parks the name of the neighborhood where he grew up climbing his old avocado tree. He texts back: “I’d call the area eastern Hollywood—no-man’s-land.” Though nowadays, he adds, it’s probably known as Adjacent Sqirl Heights. It’s a joke. Also not a joke.

Technically it’s in East Hollywood, but Sqirl—Jessica Koslow’s daytime café—defines the millennial love of hanging out in a place of offbeat, thrift-sourced, and slightly nerdy charm that is modern Silver Lake. I’ve driven up and down the street, looking for parking on gentrifying blocks choked with massive white SUVs. The sky is so blue it looks like somebody tweaked it with the Lark filter on Instagram. It caps a backdrop of tiny stucco houses, set in yards with shaggy-necked palms, monkey puzzle trees, and jacarandas shedding flowers on the sidewalk like dull purple glitter.

Sqirl, of course, is a scene. I eavesdrop as the guy in front of me says he just flew out here from New York. He’s wearing loafers and a pumpkin-colored cashmere overcoat (in this heat, an act of fashion martyrdom), open at the front to reveal denim with a mom-jeans rise.

I’m meeting a couple of food people: the writer and producer Gillian Ferguson and Evan Kleiman, host of KCRW’s Good Food radio show. Like Parks, Kleiman knew avocado toast as the default after-school snack in the 1950s and ’60s, not far from here, in the days when Silver Lake was strictly blue-collar. “In most people’s houses the toast was Wonder Bread,” she says. “In my parents’ house it was pumpernickel.”

Sqirl’s avocado toast is done in vivid slashes, like an outfit put together in a vintage shop from things you never thought would match. A layer of green-garlic crème fraîche cushions the toast underneath the avo slices; ribbons of spicy carrot pickles rise on top, sprinkled with strips of sorrel and Sqirl’s house-made za’atar, a spit-paint cloud of spices and black and white sesame seeds. It’s full of gypsy exuberance, avocado toast as the smock you appliqué fabric flowers upon. The result succeeds in a different way from the version at Goldie’s, though both rely on avocado’s richness as a foil for strong, internationally inspired flavors.

Koslow joins us. She’s in jeans and a buttoned-up white shirt, low bangs framing her face. She tells me customers freak out a little when the trees in Southern California aren’t producing fruit and she has to take avocado toast off the menu. Since the 1990s, when the U.S. changed laws about accepting imports from Mexico, we’ve thought of avocados as omnipresent (though Koslow will only use local ones).

“I think it’s like a confusion,” Koslow says. “People are always like, ‘Avocados have a season?’ We have to explain it to them.” Even in L.A., a city of backyard avocado trees, it’s easy to forget where things come from.

The next day, I’m at Jon & Vinny’s on Fairfax. The grill guy in front of me oils a thick slice of ciabatta and sets it down on the grates. The cook then salts the bread, a shower sprinkled from a high height. The avocado toast the waiter eventually produces is beautiful in a casual way: a pale paste on top of bread, articulated into stripes with the blade of a knife.

I can see flecks of chile pepper and grains of salt beneath an egg fried crisp, the whites a Van Gogh night sky of whorls. They look tea-stained at the edges, where the fat in the pan has seeped in, and the yolk is speckled with coarse pepper. Honestly, it’s pretty ugly. It’s also, essentially, un-Instagrammable. Yet truly fantastic: A photo could not reveal what’s incredible about it—the taste of the grill in the ciabatta from Gjusta in Venice, the toasted-sulfur fragrance of the egg, the richness and acidity of the avocado flesh, spread to almost imperceptible thinness. This feels like avocado toast off the grid of trendiness. It reminds me of old-school L.A.’s after-school snack—despite the fried egg and almondwood smoke—maybe because it’s the least opulent, most stripped-down version I’ve eaten.

Add smoked salmon and eggs to Paramount’s version—with its cucumber, chervil, lime, hazelnuts, and Aleppo-style pepper— and the bill comes to $22.

Photo by Alex Lau

After, on the same block, I slip into Paramount Coffee Project, another American café imported from Australia. It’s a narrow slot of a skylit cement-block space. I’m perched at the counter, opposite the coffee bar, where I tell the mustachioed Aussie waiter in cutoffs and an apron zigzag-tied up the back that I want the avo toast.

“No worries, man,” he says, though his accent makes it sound like wahrries. In this context, avocado toast begins to feel foreign again, almost cool. During a playlist blasting the 1984 Hall & Oates track “Out of Touch,” Aussie guy drops off my toast. It’s a Sydney Mardi Gras glitter bomb, an explosion of toasted, chopped hazelnuts and chervil sprigs, surrounding a slice of toast plastered in green, bristling slices of Persian cucumber, like an exotic fish with scales that somehow flare.

It’s tasty. And truly ridiculous. But isn’t that the entire point of ordering avocado toast these days? I shoot a dozen pics. I’m certain one will slay on Instagram.

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